IN her Glasgow home, single mother Shona Lewendon is juggling the care of her three boisterous sons with masterminding a global campaign to save the dolphin.

In the midst of a passionate tirade of indignation over Japan’s slaughter of dolphins, she is interrupted by her three-year-old’s desire to show her the shiny apple he is eating.

Luckily, Shona is a patient woman and it appears she can be both a successful campaigner and a devoted mother to Reece, 14, Tyler, six, and Shane, three.

She said: “It is a juggling exercise, that’s for sure, but I think what I am doing is important, not just for the planet but my boys. I want them to grow up respecting the planet and the animals that live in it.”

The Global Olympic Dolphins Campaign is Shona’s brainchild and is gathering momentum at a rate beyond her comprehension.

The home shopping manager is now backed by an international team of volunteers who have helped build a website and launch campaigns.

Her lightbulb moment came in January when Tokyo emerged with Istanbul and Madrid as a frontrunner to win the 2020 Olympic bid.

No one had thought to pair Japan’s bid with the incompatibility of the mass killings of dolphins, which take place every year from September to April in the fishing port of Taiji.

In 2009, the killings gained worldwide attention following the release of the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove.

The scenes of carnage, of the seas turned red by dolphin blood, opened the eyes of the world to the barbarism of the practice of not just killing dolphins but the lucrative trade in capturing the youngest and prettiest of the pods for marine shows.

In January, Shona launched an online petition, making it clear that this was not an attack on the Japanese people or their government.

She said: “The petition simply asks the Olympic committee to follow its own rules – to respect the environment.”

She thought that if she could muster 1000 signatures it would be a head start but by the fifth day she had 10,000 of them.

She said: “It went crazy. I just couldn’t keep up. At one point someone, somewhere in the world, was signing that petition every four seconds.”

The petition has now attracted 350,000 signatures from 226 countries and Japan is in the top 25 per cent of its supporters.

She said: “The Japanese want something done, too. They want their country to follow the rules and they want to stop the slaughter.”

Shona, 39, first became interested in helping wildlife when her primary school teacher explained the destruction of whale and dolphin populations to his class. As a child, she spent some time in South Africa where her family had moved temporarily. She was entranced by the wildlife in the habitat around her.

But her true inspiration came from first watching The Cove. She said: “It left me in pieces. I actually couldn’t watch it in one go. Even now, after seeing all the images, I find it heartbreaking.”

She sent off letters and emails of protest but realised that they were either being spammed or binned. The Olympics seemed to her to be the key to change.

She said: “I thought, ‘How could they be hunting whales yet still considered environmentally responsible enough to host the Olympics?’

Bottlenose dolphins (Image: Getty Images)

“When I asked around, I realised that no one was actually campaigning against their bid, no one had put Japan potentially getting the Olympics side by side with the issue of their slaughter of dolphins, so I decided to do it.

“Olympians and the Olympics are highly respected in Japan and I believe that if the International Olympic Committee were to challenge this unsustainable hunt, the Japanese Government would have to listen and address the issue if they are to be considered a modern, respectful nation, worthy of host nation status.

“I decided to use the Olympics as leverage to hopefully finally bring these outdated barbaric hunts to an end.”

In research, she discovered that any country making a bid had to adhere to an ethical environmental approach.

According to the Olympic Charter Agenda, both the environment and humanity are a priority for any host country. It states: “Man has a special responsibility to safeguard and wisely manage the heritage of wildlife and its habitat, which are now gravely imperilled by a combination of adverse factors.

“Respect applies equally to people as well as to the environment and its natural systems.”

The Japanese Olympic Committee even established its own commission, which was instructed to “spread the message of environmental conservation”.

There was hostility to Shona’s idea. Surprisingly, some came from campaigners who felt that a Tokyo Olympics would give them a perfect platform at which to protest.

But she said: “By 2020, how many dolphins will have been slaughtered? It made no sense to me to wait.”

She decided the petition was one thing but it was important to take the protest off computers and on to the streets.

In the freezing February snow, she organised a demonstration outside the Japanese consulate in Edinburgh, which attracted global attention from campaigners.

Within days she had inspired another 43 events across the world.

Shona said: “I think the change in Japan depends on how much pressure they perceive themselves to be under.

“They know that it is not just some crazy tree hugger having a moan who can be easily dismissed. This is a global outcry. Japan has to listen to the international community.”

Shona’s children now hit the streets with her and Tyler calls himself her “assistant”. He is able to explain the details of the campaign to anyone willing to listen.

Every year, Japanese fishermen drive dolphins into a cove where dolphin trainers from around the world select the best specimens, for which they pay up to £100,000.

Shona has now attracted the support and admiration of one of the main forces behind The Cove, Richard O’Barry, a longtime activist who was responsible for training the dolphins on the 60s TV show Flipper.

O’Barry had captured and trained all five of the dolphins used in Flipper but the more time he spent with them, the more he realised that what he was part of was an immoral and cruel circus.

When one died in his arms after refusing to breathe, he decided to devote his life to saving the dolphins.

He said: “Dolphins are not automatic air breathers like we are. Every breath for them is a conscious effort She looked me right in the eye, took a breath, held it and she didn’t take another one. She just sank to the bottom of the water. That had a profound effect on me.”

Shona dismisses the fishermen’s claim that it is their cultural right to hunt dolphins as a distraction from reality.

She said: “The main reason they do it is for money, not for an age-old tradition.

“The big earners are the young pretty dolphins with no marks or scars on them that they take for captivity. That has nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with cash.”

Dolphin shows have been illegal in the UK since 1998 but there are 53 marine parks in Japan alone.

They are also popular across European countries, including Turkey and Spain as well as Asia and the United States.

Many British tourists go to see the shows with no idea that they are fuelling the cruel trade.

The Cove film sparked action

For every one dolphin that is in captivity, campaigners estimate that 17 more will have died in the wild during the hunt.

Shona said: “I would say first and foremost to people – never, ever go to a marine show or you are party to this trade.”

When the most attractive dolphins are captured, the rest of their family are slaughtered and their meat processed for consumption.

The steaks are sold to consumers and there are claims that the rest is used for animal feed, which then passes through the food chain.

Mercury levels in the meat are dangerously high and in Japan there has been furore over the cover-up of the hazards to consumers.

The mercury levels can be 20 to 5000 times higher in dolphin and small whale meat than levels recommended by the UN World Health Organization and the Japanese Ministry of Health. Mercury exposure at high levels can harm the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs and immune system.

The levels in residents in Taiji, where there is a high consumption of dolphin meat, are up to five times higher than similar villages in Japan.

The mortality rate in Taiji is also much higher than comparable areas. Many Japanese are eating the meat with no idea of how dangerous it is.

Shona said: “This is not just an animal rights issue but a human rights issue. The citizens of Japan are not aware that the dolphin meat they are consuming is laden with mercury.”

There is not the demand for dolphin and whale meat that there once was and there are now stockpiles of thousands of tons of it in freezers across Japan.

In July, as Japan was in Switzerland, presenting its bid to the 2020 International Olympic Committee, the country was at the Hague facing a landmark legal challenge by Australia to end its whale hunt in the Southern Ocean.

Every year Japan slaughters 935 minke whales and 50 fin whales in the area, which Australia declared a whale sanctuary in 1999.

According to the Japanese Fisheries Research Agency, 1623 dolphins were caught in Wakayama Prefecture in 2007 for human consumption or resale to dolphinariums – and most of these were caught at Taiji.

The commission to evaluate the candidatures for the 2020 Olympic Games will be chaired by Sir Craig Reedie, IOC vice-president and an IOC member in Great Britain.

Shona has received emails from Reedie, saying that the matter will be given due consideration – but in her mind, he’s “fobbing me off”.

The methods used to hunt the dolphins are cruel and inhumane, as is the method of slaughter, thrusting a spear in the spinal cord, which scientists now agree can lead to a slow, painful death.

Shona said: “The slaughters continue, now hidden under tarpaulins, in an effort to conceal the bloodshed.

“But the world is watching – and the international opposition for this practice to stop is loud and clear.”